Relative URL for new URL in Redirect directive

[anjanesh]

Why do Redirect, RedirectMatch, RedirectPermanent all require absolute URLs for the new URLs ?

Is there no way to specify a relative one ?

[Caterham]

For the pattern, the directives operate on r->uri and not r->filename, for the substitution: You would clone code complexibility from mod_rewrite which is not intended of course.
To issue a redirect, apache must build an URL. mod_rewrite can build an URL-path from a local path automatically, if your site lives under the document_root and r->filename with striped document_root is the corresponding URL-path. If you don't have a document_root variable (e.g. mass virtual hosting by mod_vhost_alias) or the URL-path is not directly related to the filesystem path, you'll have to specify the URL-path via the RewriteBase directive.

Cloning such features into mod_alias is not intended.

[jdMorgan]

You may find that the answer lies in the difference between an external redirect and an internal rewrite [webmasterworld.com].

The Redirect and RedirectMatch directives in mod_alias do external redirects as their names imply, whereas mod_rewrite does external redirects OR internal rewrites (or proxy through-puts), depending on the syntax that you specify in your RewriteRule directive.

Jim

[g1smd]

If URLs could be relative, then you would not be fixing www vs. non-www Duplicate Content issues within the redirect.

You'd need a second redirect to fix those, and that Redirection Chain would cause issues all of its own.